West is not only direction to the world's path ahead

By Mark Mazower, The Irish Times, Friday 1 April
2005

Once upon a time there was the West, winner of history's race to
modernity, and there were the rest, trying to catch up.

Every society was thought to make the same journey, at greater or
lesser speed, from hidebound tradition to the bright promise of
industrial modernity and unrestricted economic growth. If it did not,
something had gone wrong: it might be excessive attachment to
(non-Christian) religions and creeds, or to pre-modern sources of
loyalty such as the family and the tribe.

Women were a litmus test: where their feet were bound or heads
covered, there was little hope for their communities without radical
change delivered by western-oriented saviours. Secularism,
urbanisation and market forces would propel them forward.

During the cold war, fleshing out this self-congratulatory model kept
academics busy. According to the historians, the West owed its ascent
not just to anything as recent or crudely violent as 19th-century
colonial expansion or the preceding industrial revolution but to
other, more venerable institutions and values.

For some, the West's ascent was thanks to a 17th-century
“scientific revolution”—the moment at which humanity
supposedly asserted its claim to knowledge over the censorious power
of religious authorities; for others, it was the rise of capitalist
banking, perhaps even the emergence of a church-state balance of
powers centuries before.

All this reflected the realities of the time. Europe's dreams of
world domination, shattered in the bloodletting of war, had passed to
the US: extolling the West's virtues served to assert the depth of
shared transatlantic values, and simultaneously defined them against
the cold war barbarians to the east.

So it should not surprise us now, as US power approaches its military
and economic zenith and confronts the rapid emergence of India and
China, that the shifting global balance is altering our understanding
of the past once again.

According to some east Asia experts in the US, the West's ascent
was reasonably recent and fortuitous: in 1800, China's gross
national product was probably still higher than Europe's. For them
the Pacific, not the Atlantic, is key to understanding the long run of
world development. Their findings give western policymakers reason to
pause before seeking to spread their own values around the globe.

For if the West's rise is no more than two centuries old, its
success may owe more to contingency and less to values than its
cheerleaders believe. For states as for stock markets, what goes up
may also come down.

From the Enlightenment onwards, the ascendancy of the West was
contrasted with the moribund east. Its origins were traced back to
Greece and Rome rather than, say, Egypt and Mesopotamia. India was
ignored, at least until the British marched in. The Chinese were
credited, thanks to Marco Polo, with pasta and ice cream and
occasionally, paper.

Yet we now know that in terms of per capita income or density of
trading networks, there was little to choose between the most advanced
parts of Europe and sophisticated Asian economies before the late 18th
century. It was not lack of curiosity or weakness that explains why
the Ottomans, the Moghuls, the Russians and the Chinese did not join
the European mania for exploration and colonisation; they did not need
to. Their expansion took place mostly by land and they left costly
maritime ventures to the profligate but technologically inventive
Europeans.

Conversely, it was not brilliant success but rather imminent
impoverishment that forced a resource-bare, crowded island off
Europe's north-west coast to move to a labour-intensive,
coal-based economy. Britain's embrace of new technologies was
fostered by its rulers' ruthless priorities.

Whereas the older empires placed a premium on social stability,
successive British governments focused on developing military
technologies, state-licensed trading companies and market-driven
systems of credit. The outcomes were often internally destabilising,
but in small countries this mattered less than in large
ones. Britain's European rivals could hardly afford not to follow.

Only in the 19th century did Europe, a conflict-torn region of small,
belligerent states, leap decisively ahead of the great Eurasian land
empires, spreading capitalism and colonialism across the globe, before
being overtaken in turn by its child-rival, the US.

Today, barely 200 years since the West's ascendancy, its end may
be in sight. Yet many western policymakers continue to see their own
values as universally desirable, the key not only to their past but to
everyone else's future. A precarious argument.

States that believe promotion of their interests depends on export of
their culture and values are doomed to fail. Better to realise that
religious politics is not necessarily a sign of medievalism, and that
privatised democracies are not a one-size cure for the world's
ills.

Of course China's rise does not portend the downfall of the US or
Europe, but it does challenge the West's self-perception as the
civilisational hegemon in global affairs. In this context revitalising
the United Nations becomes more vital than ever, for ideas translate
precariously across the boundaries of language and belief, and life
will not be easier in the absence of the international forums that
make mutual comprehension possible.

The world before 1800 was one of multiple power-centres and value
systems: let us adjust to the fact that it is starting to look like
that again.—(Financial Times Service)

[Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University and
author of Salonica, City of Ghosts:
Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950
(Harper-Collins/Knopf)]